I Am Not A Geek, But I Play One When Querying Google

I swear,
I am not a geek. But I could hear myself sounding like one asking Google’s top ad execs some tough, albeit incredibly wonky questions Thursday morning during a “salon-style”
breakfast with the New York advertising press, making my peers wince and roll their eyes like they were chanting “Oh, Mandese” in unison. I actually felt bad, but it was a unique
opportunity, because it’s rare for the Googlers to go on-the-record in a public setting like that. So my colleagues may have wanted ot know about Google’s plans for integrating with the
Super Bowl, but I was more interested in how they are shifting the marketplace, and how they are utilizing the unprecedented power of their data to do it. Due to the setting, I didn’t get the
kind of answers I really wanted, but I got one really surprising one. Google doesn’t know how big its market actually is. And that scares me, because if Google can’t organize its own
world’s information, how can it do it for the rest of us?

Specifically, it doesn’t know how big its programmatic marketplace is,
even though it said it knows how fast it’s growing, and who it’s growing from. According to Scott Spencer, director of product management for the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, Google’s
programmatic business is growing by about 50% year-over-year, and much of that expansion is coming from a shift “from direct response to brand” advertisers using its programmatic
platforms.

When I asked Spencer how big the programmatic marketplace, he said he didn’t actually know, but that Google has
“billions” of advertisers using its programmatic platforms -- both search and display. The problem with that number is that the Google execs estimated they only reach about 1.8 billion
unique users, so if I do the math, that means Google has more advertisers than it has people to serve their ads to.

When I asked Spencer how he
knew the growth was coming from brand advertisers, he said it was based on the types of ads Google was seeing bought through its programmatic platforms. In other words, it’s a value
judgement.

I’m not saying that I don’t believe programmatic is growing, and that it’s not growing among brand advertisers
willing ot pay publishers more of a premium. I’m just saying I’m surprised Google doesn’t have a more precise view of how, when, where, why and with whom that is
happening.

For example, when Spencer told the ad industry reporters that programmatic buys yielding CPMs above $5 were growing 21% and ones
yielding over $10 were growing 17%, I asked him what the rate of growth was for buys yielding under $5 CPMs and he said he didn’t know, but that they were growing too.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a complicated business. An I increasingly find myself asking complicated follow-up questions to people trying to explain it. I just
expect that some of them might know the answers, especially if they run Google.

Joe, glad you are out there asking questions, and good ones. Interesting that it's hard for a "system" to essentially evaluate the creative to understand whether it is aimed at building brand, awareness, trust, etc. or aiming to drive an immediate action. Pretty clear to me that it's still a DR business.

3 paid spots above organic search results.
7 down the right hand side..
10 ads for each search....
each user does 3 searches?
30 ads for one user...
number not so wonky anymore?
Wait.. they searched on Google 3 times... and 5 more on Youtube.. watched 4 ads waiting to view videos...
where is our number of ads displayed now for one user's session??
how many times do you search a day?
on www?
on mobile device? or tablet?
my number is close to 30 searches a day..
(minimum)
if i view 20 ads on each search, i am responsible for 600 ad impressions?
of course that is only if i only view the first page... my job is search, so i have to go at least 3 pages deep, (if client is not in top 3 pages